The PCC Rule in the 3GPP IMS Policy and Charging Control Architecture

Optimized processing and cost efficient solutions for providing and controlling the quality of service (QoS) are important issues for the 3GPP operators. Although the main frame of the IMS architecture in the area was defined, i.e. the policy and charging control architecture (PCC), it misses a clear definition and standardized processing of the interchanged messages. This allows for a set of different perspectives on how the main information unit of the architecture, the PCC rule, is deployable. Based on the incomplete set of requirements already existent, this paper proposes two solutions on handling QoS provisioning architectural aspects of the IMS. It also considers a comparative evaluation of the prototypes developed in this work for proving the concept of the two approaches.